


It's Just Screaming That Makes Sense

by Zenthisoror



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Brother Feels, Canon Universe, Crack, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Hallucinations, Hunk wonders who's going to be 'harmonising', Hurt/Comfort, Keith does not want to sing, Loosely borrowing the premise of Once More with Feeling - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Multiple Pov, Occasional musical references, Space Mould, Terrible rhymes, The Musical Episode
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9823943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zenthisoror/pseuds/Zenthisoror
Summary: Voltron has a problem. A musical problem.And Keith isn't going to let some hallucinogenic space mould control him into singing and dancing.It's not as if it could kill him.(Inspired by 'Once More with Feeling', 'La La Land', the author's love for the West End, and a hankering need to spew out crack, featuring such songs so far as 'The Exposition Song', 'The Closet Song', 'Someday' and 'My Brother from a Purple Mother'.)Terrible lyrics by the author. Music by your own mind.





	1. The Exposition Song/ The Closet Song

**Author's Note:**

> If music be the food of love, play on and hope that nobody aims a rocket launcher at the band pit.
> 
> I adore musical episodes and, if I ruled the world, every series would have one. There may also be aggressively enforced world peace and institutionalised hypocrisy, so that would be a terrible, terrible idea.

_Plink!_

It was a single note, clear as a bell, falling sweet as a lemon drop.

A piano.

Perfectly tuned.

Waiting for the next deft touch on its ivory keys.

Lance stirred and turned over in his bed.

If this was a dream, he was going to let it play on. A bit of piano made a welcome change from screaming lasers and visions of soundless spherical explosions, and either he was dreaming or he was going stir crazy at last. There was no piano on the Castle Ship, let alone an _Earth_ piano, not some Altean knock-off and that was definitely an Earth piano playing.

Lance frowned into his pillow. He couldn’t explain how he knew that.

Three tentative chords, as if the pianist (and if this wasn’t a dream, who would be playing? It had better not be Keith) was a little shy to start.

Then unknown fingers walked up the notes with the cheeky, sly kind of saunter Lance wouldn’t have minded being his own personal theme tune, ending on a fine, wheedling little trill.

The notes faded.

Morning in the Castle Ship held its breath.

And then the band kicked in.

As if catapaulted out of bed by the very beat of the drums, Lance was on his feet and whirling through his morning routine.

 _“Another crazy morning out in space.”_ Whoa, what was this? In the bathroom mirror, Lance watched as his own mouth stretched around the shapes of words that _he_ was singing - and, wow, was he singing! He sounded amazing! And the words, they were coming from him! Dragged up from somewhere deep inside his own mind from what was clearly a previously untapped wellspring of musical genius and spontaneity, but _what was this?_ “ _Another crazy morning – why, hello there, my radiant face.”_

Radiant? Well, if his own mind was going to be nice to him today, he wasn’t going to stop it. He patted his face dry and the band continued its jaunty, upbeat tune. A trumpet came in, the beat picked up and Lance found himself spinning on the spot, to throw his dressing gown onto the bed with a dramatic flourish. It landed perfectly, practically folding itself, but before Lance had the chance to gawk at his handiwork or collect his thoughts beyond, ‘ _Smooth, McClain!’,_ his mouth was moving again.

_“We’ve got world’s to liberate, Zarkon’s army to obliterate.”_

His hand and feet moved deftly to put on his shoes and jacket in time to the music.

_“Who knows what today will bring!”_

The room door swept open, and Lance danced out, opening his arms wide in a gesture he vaguely remembered as better suited for nuns on hillsides.

_“What is this? What’s going on? There’s music in my head, I’m bursting out into song.”_

He tripped dancing down the stairs, thankfully on the last step. The strange music filling his ears and somehow seeping right down to his bones punctuated his fall with a trumpet warble. As if to rub it in.

“ _There’s something crazy happening every quintent, brand new dangers of mysterious intent,_

_So if I wake up singing and dancing, I can deal with it just fine!”_

He couldn’t control his arms, his legs, his hands or feet. They moved to the bouncing band music and the honky-tonk piano as if to strings.

Lance let out a shaky laugh.

“ _I can deal with it just fine!”_

Could he? Could Lance deal with this?

_“I can deal with it just fine…”_

The music trailed off. Lance’s feet slowed. It gave him a chance to scowl up at the ceiling. Of course, he could deal with this! There was no need for the music to fade away as if had had a crisis in confidence!

The corridor plunged into darkness. A spotlight snapped on, dazzling Lance with white light.

The piano dropped another prompting note.

 _“Unless, it’s some sort of alien mould in the ventilation,”_ Lance sang, quiet and uncertain. “ _Making me sing and dance and have this spotlight hallucination…”_

Well, when the words from Lance’s own mouth were putting it that way, that sounded…

_…that sounded…_

He smiled.

…that actually sounded pretty damn cool!

What if this wasn’t just Lance? What if this was happening to everybody? The possibilities, oh, the possibilities, they were a beautiful thing.

The music allowed him a moment to cackle to himself, before throwing him out of the spotlight with a balletic leap and into the last part of the song.

 _“It’s another crazy morning out in space,”_ Lance swung from a decorative pillar and dropped to the floor – he had never noticed the pillar there before, he had to swing from it more often, “ _I’m doing the opening exposition number to set the tone and pace.”_

His sides felt a little sore after that pillar-swing but he didn’t care. “ _Well, whatever’s going on down here, I hope I’m not alone here.”_

If Lance had woken up that day with broadway level ability in singing and dancing, he wasn’t going to waste it. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t so strange at all. People had woken up from comas fluent in foreign languages, so who’s to say Lance couldn’t become fluent in musical theatre from a good night’s sleep?

Hell, he had background music. He had a theme. He had music that punctuated all of his, completely intentional, moments of physical comedy!

He turned back to face the empty corridor and spread his arms wide again. This time, it felt as if he was inviting an audience.

 _“In this crazy sudden musical out in space!”_                                                           

Lance clicked his heels together and exited stage right - onto the bridge.

* * *

 

At the sound of the doors opening, Hunk, Pidge, Shiro, Coran and Allura turned as one for Lance’s grand, smooth, piano-backed entrance.

Their expressions told him everything he needed to know.

He threw his arms in the air, relieved beyond speech, but apparently not beyond lyrics. “ _It’s not just me!”_

 _“It’s not just you!”_ agreed Hunk, moving forward to slap hands in a high five, before gesturing at the others gathered. “ _It’s not just us, it’s them too!”_

Shiro sighed and turned to Allura. “ _We have a problem.”_

It came out sung. Followed by a pluck on a – was that a cello? Pidge snickered.

Shiro closed his eyes then opened his mouth, very slowly and deliberately, as though he could sneak up and ambush his words into ordinary speech patterns. “ _A musical problem.”_

Hunk’s shoulders shook with barely suppressed laughter. Shiro sighed, ran a hand over his face and went on, “ _Is there anything that could have been broken on the ship to cause this problem?”_

Allura frowned, pursing her lips. “ _Why do you assume it is the ship?”_

 _“Because it’s usually the problem,”_ piped up Pidge, settled in her chair and making busy with the Castle Ship schematics on a holographic panel. Shiro groaned as Pidge’s tune echoed his own. _“If it’s not purple space cats – “_

_“Space-cat-chinchilla-bats – “_

Pidge ignored Lance. _“- a ship ten thousand years overdue for servicing is the most likely problem.”_

There was a delicate sweep of harp-strings and Coran stepped forward, the back of his hand pressed to his chin and waggling his fingers in what would later be recognised as a traditional narrative gesture from Altean water operas, one which meant both ‘despair’ and ‘blasphemy’ but also ‘respect the ship my forefathers built, ye graceless child’.

“ _While I take some offence at the implications, this ship has seen some serious altercations. I shall commence full-system diagnostics – until then, you may use these to play Prokrostrics,”_ over the sound of Lance’s sniggering, Coran pulled out a box of what appeared to be blackboards hung on cords, silver styluses clipped to their frames, from behind Pidge’s chair, “ _and to solve our conversational problem.”_

Shiro took the board Coran offered him and experimentally traced the stylus across it. A purple line seeped up from the black surface like a hair attached hooked to the stylus tip. Hanging the board around his neck, Shiro wrote, _Good job, Coran,_ and held it up for Coran to see.

Beaming, Coran held up his own board, where orange letters read, _Tap twice with the stylus to clear it and it’ll be fresh and clean as a platwort again._

 _“I was wondering what would rhyme with diagnostics,”_ Lance span the board between his fingers. _“Thought I was about to get called out for the time I bought a nosepick.”_

 _What are Prokrostrics?_ asked Pidge, tapping at the green words on her board to get Coran’s attention, and it was in the midst of Coran and Allura’s demonstration of what looked like an Altean variant of Noughts and Crosses - where the grid was overlaid with a spiral and players could add and remove lines to the grid on their turns - that the doors to the bridge hissed open and Keith appeared.

In a desperate attempt to apparently gag himself, Keith had twisted a towel into a rope and crammed it between his teeth.

He took in the blackboards around their necks and, at the realisation that he wasn’t alone in his torment, sweet relief flashed through his eyes. When Shiro held up a spare blackboard for him, he eagerly crossed the room, unknotting the towel from the back of his neck.

Opening his mouth to work his jaw, however, turned out to be a mistake.

From nowhere, fell a spotlight. Music dragged Keith’s hand upwards into a clenched fist. 

 _“I REFUSE TO SING,”_ he sung, and at the mortifying vibrato clinging to his voice, drawing each word out long and full, in the spirit of rebels singing their unbending principles at a barricade, Keith’s face went a bright, glowing red.

Shiro, Lance and Pidge burst out laughing.

* * *

 

If they were going to be singing and dancing during a fight, they had to be prepared.

 _We’re going to have to consider building stamina,_ Shiro wrote, tapping the board with the stylus to continue. _We don’t want to be tired out because we were line-dancing down the corridors of a Galra space-ship before engaging in a fight._

Hunk let out a nervous laugh. _Shiro, you’re kind of making this sound like a long-term thing._

 _Until we know what’s caused this and what THIS is so that we can stop it,_ Shiro underlined THIS with a squeak of his stylus, _we’re going to have to treat it like it very well could be._

 _Great!_ Lance jumped up and down with his blackboard over his head. _Because I want to hear Keith sing his_ feelings _. I’ve got my bets it’ll be twentieth century eighties pop. Any takers?_

All but growling around the towel stuffed into his mouth again, Keith unclipped his stylus with a flick, poised it on the board like a sprinter on a starting line and looked ready to pour out an essay on the subject of his feelings when Hunk waved to get everybody’s attention.

 _Hey, if we’re (temporarily, for some mysterious undefinable reason) living a musical, do you reckon one of us might get a power ballad?_ Hunk’s eyes were shining. _Or a duet? Or, you know,_  Hunk drew a heart around the last word on his board, _harmonising?_

After a mixed bag of expressions, ranging from blank looks, blushes, horror to quiet contemplation, crossed every face in the room Shiro cleared his throat and very emphatically slapped his blackboard with a clack of metal.

_TRAINING NOW._

They ignored Lance’s insistence to call it ‘rehearsing’.

* * *

  _“Paladins, gather, we have results to be seen,”_ Allura’s voice sung out over the intercom. “ _It’s not good, it’s not bad, but something between. Come one, come all!”_

Deftly twirling string music swept them up from their rooms and buoyed them to the bridge, where Allura and Coran were waiting. A yellow canister, about a foot long, capped with steel, blinked at the paladins with a small green light. A glass panel in its side showed its contents. Inside was something red and gelatinous, pulsating with black and white twisting threads.

And something about those twisting, pulsing threads reminded Lance of piano keys.

Allura held up the canister in one hand whilst Coran showed them his blackboard: _We have identified the cause of this singing and dancing water-opera problem!_

Pidge pointed at the thing in the canister, _What the quiznak is that?_

 _The sporangial mass of an, as yet to be identified, fungus! I found it growing on the crystals you gathered from the Gallubean moon for the air filtration system._ Coran flipped the board over. _This, my young paladins, is the origin of our problems. It’s been releasing its spores into our ventilation system for something in around three quintents._

Allura set down the canister and, gravely, held up her sign, where her pink looping script read: _Unfortunately, it seems that we have all been infected by its spores._

 _Which are releasing neurotoxins into our bodies that cause audiosomatic semi-telepathised hallucinations_ , finished Coran.

Lance raised his hand. _In non-advanced biology terms?_

 _We’ve got freak space mould in our bodies making us hallucinate this whole musical. I’m guessing that the ‘semi-telepathised’ part means we’re hallucinating this whole musical as a_ group _,_ replied Pidge, stroking her chin and squinting at the red jelly fungal mass in the canister, _which would explain how we’re all hearing the same music and somehow coordinating the singing and dancing when we’re in a room together._

_Broadway space mould. Wicked._

_But, guys, shouldn’t we be worried?_ Hunk underlined ‘worried’ several times. _Nothing that ends in ‘toxins’ is ever good news, right?_

_Which is why we will be setting our course for the Gallubean system immediately. We have no records of anything like this in our archives. Perhaps the people of the system that the fungus is endemic to will be able to help us._

Shiro nodded. _That sounds like a good idea, Princess_.

 _In the meantime, Coran will study the sample we have obtained and examine each of us individually, so that we can confirm its effects._ She gave them a faintly rueful smile. _I’m afraid it will take us a day or so to return there. I cannot, on good conscience, attempt opening a wormhole in the knowledge that I may break out into a varga-long water-opera aria during the process. It would be much too dangerous. The highest notes of an Altean soprano would shred your delicate human ear drums._

The red jelly pulsed in the canister like a demon blood blister.

* * *

 

Keith had not been having a good day.

He had woken to finger snapping. Specifically his own fingers snapping. Not _actually_ snapping, like celery (something about broken fingers had always reminded Keith of celery when they happened), but dropping smart, beat-defining clicks between agitated taps on a snare drum. And after that it had only got worse when he was struck by a strange, insistent, most profound and horrifying urge to open his mouth and sing.

He hadn’t been sure what he had been about to sing about, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t want to know. Something was obviously messing with his head, so he had done the most sensible thing he could think of and stuffed the corner of his blanket into his mouth, whilst he hunted his room for any item that would make a better, more portable, gag.

It wasn’t the singing that was the problem. Keith had nothing against singing. If he had to be honest, those opening snaps and snare had been kind of catchy. If only they hadn’t raised all the hairs on the back of his neck and made every instinct whisper-scream with, ‘ _Something is wrong and this is not okay_ ’, he might have been tempted to go along with it.

But he wouldn’t have, because this was Keith’s body and Keith’s voice, and he would rather chew on his own towel than surrender to whatever it was that had tried to possess him. He sang on his own terms, damn it  - and not, as it turned out, because some space mould was hijacking his body. He was master of himself. Nothing and nobody else.

He hated not being in control, not being able to _trust_ his own feet, to have that unthinking certainty that when called to do so, his body would and could do exactly what he needed of it.

So much of his speed, agility and the snap-decisions that he could make in battle depended on a simple _knowing_. Shiro had once in training called it ‘an innate awareness of everything Keith’. It was all subconscious. He never had to consciously think about his position in relation his surroundings,or  his stance, or his skin, the spring in his joints and where he had centred his weight. He relied on the instincts rooted in his body to cover those things whilst Keith focused his mind on solving the problem presented to him in the fastest, most absolute, most _certain_ way.

Certainty. This space mould had stripped all that away from him. If he couldn’t trust his body, half the certainty in his actions was gone. He was second-guessing himself with every movement and every time he opened his mouth.

He felt betrayed in his own skin, or perhaps he had been feeling that way ever since his knife had stretched out into the dark sword of a Blade of Marmora in his hands.

Keith sighed and tried to re-focus on the tablet. He had been scrolling through the records of their trip to the Gallubean moon where this weird fungus had supposedly come from, in a vain attempt to remember if they had seen anything like it (they hadn’t, he was sure of it) on the surface, when there was movement in the corner of his eyes.

Lance had slid onto the sofa next to him, arms folded and one eyebrow raised.

Keith pretended that he wasn’t there.

Then Lance breathed.

And there was an expectant piano ‘ _plink!’_

_“So I was thinking…”_

Keith lowered the tablet and very emphatically held up his blackboard: NO.

“ _…about why you don’t want to sing, and it’s fine, I get that this is all a bit freaky,_

_I saw the space mice, and even they were getting…squeaky.”_

Keith groaned into the towel. Dimly, he wondered what he was going to do when it came to dinner. Maybe if he ate fast enough with big enough mouthfuls, he’d be able to stuff the singing out of him. The other part of him wondered where all these lyrics were coming from. If they were from neurotoxins acting on Lance’s brain, should he blame the space mould or Lance?

Unfortunately for Keith, Lance had taken his silence as permission to carry on, and the music – goddammit, the music! – had picked up pace.

“ _I thought it might be the whole feelings thing, because you don’t even talk that, let alone sing.”_

As far as Keith had it, he didn’t _talk_ about his feelings because he didn’t need to. What would it achieve? And, quite frankly, why would anybody want to know? Why would they be interested? On a side note, an electric guitar had joined in. Apparently this song was going full pop.

He could walk away right now.

He clenched his hands into fists and gritted his teeth. Willed his feet to move.

He couldn’t.

That same force that put his fingers snapping in the morning was holding him in place on the sofa. Keith’s body wasn’t obeying him.

Keith wanted to scream. Thank god for the towel that he didn’t, but maybe it showed on his face because Lance gave him an oddly concerned look before carrying on:

“ _And I talked to Hunk and he said talk to you,_

 _Because,”_ Lance put his hand around his mouth, “ _I have this theory, you see, a real humdinger – “_

Must be the semi-telepathic thing. That was a Coran word. The space mould was even hijacking their vocabularies. This was a nightmare. Why couldn’t Lance see that?

“ - _You don’t want to sing…”_ Lance whispered, the music ebbing with all the intention, Keith could feel it, of rising again. And then he caught up with what Lance had sung and was filled with a nonsensical surge of dread, which was ridiculous because he wasn’t hiding anything that he could ever dread Lance working out, “ _– because you’re a closeted singer.”_

Keith stared at him.

Lance grinned and, before Keith could even confirm or deny it, he had leapt up from the sofa with his hands on his hips. _“It’s okay, Keith, we’ll all understand, I just want you to know that if you ever need to talk, I’m right here at hand.”_

Keith snatched up his blackboard. I AM NOT A CLOSETED SINGER. He flipped it over. THERE’S NO SUCH THING.

Lance’s eyes glittered. _“Sure there’s such a thing, all you need is a closet. And people have closets of all shapes and sizes.”_

The door hissed open and Hunk and Pidge arrived. Keith could only watch in dismayed disbelief as, arms over their heads and poised on their toes, they pirouetted across the common room more with more grace than he had ever seen either of them possess to assemble behind Lance.

Hunk managed to lower one arm from his pose to point at his blackboard: _Lance, what did you do?_

Lance only smirked and shimmied with the music, which was building, to something. Keith dreaded what.

Pidge shot Keith a dirty look as if this was all, somehow, his fault, arms held above her head like she had been taken prisoner.  

And then the three of them broke into a ridiculously vigorous dance routine in the middle of the common room, Lance singing at the top of his voice – passionately, surprisingly tunefully, and then, knocking Keith’s expectations completely off-kilter, with an honest, sincere conviction in his own words.

_“If you’re hiding something deep because you think we’ll all despise it,_

_Or call it sick and dirty, and to put it back where we won’t find it,_

_Then you’ve made yourself a closet, a lie fit for you,_

_Just don’t fit yourself in your closet, because it’s not meant to be true.”_

Keith didn’t know what to make of that. Or rather, he did, he just didn’t know what to make of this onslaught of warm sincerity radiating from the three dancing in front of him, who despite Pidge’s reluctant and Hunk’s baffled expressions, seemed, well, they definitely _sounded_ as if they were…

…singing something they truly felt from the bottom of their hearts.

Something hurt, a twinge in his chest, like the touch of a glowing match.

He didn’t want to hear this, the space mould, digging up the others’ feelings and turning it into tacky rhymes and song and dance routines, the music they were hallucinating together laying bare all the layers of emotions that even words could usually hide.

He sighed and held up his blackboard: LOOK. I CAME OUT AS GALRA. I’M DONE WITH CLOSETS.

He hadn’t meant to write that. He had meant to write for them to _stop_. Lance, however, simply shrugged and clapped his hands in Keith’s face.

_“So you’re partially purple and your mum’s a space ninja. Pidge – “_

_“ - is a girl – “_  That was Hunk.

_“- and she came out as ginger.”_

_“What the quiznak, Lance?”_

_“You can have any number of closets, of all types and roles,_

_Maybe you stack them, small to big, like Russian dolls.”_

Keith was laughing. Not out loud, but inside, yes, he was laughing. He couldn’t help it. If the towel wasn’t in his mouth he probably would have started belly-laughing at how awful this whole business was the moment Hunk and Pidge twirled their way into the room, but if he did that, he’d probably end up singing with the rest of them, _giving in_ , and he was _not going to do it._

_“So if you’re a closeted singer and you think we’ll make fun of you,_

_At how your voice wobbles and you can’t for scheisse hold a tune,_

_To break it to you, mullet, we’ll make fun of you anyway - ”_

Thanks, Lance.

_“- But not because of what you hide. That’s just not done, okay?”_

No, Keith was not okay. Lance was patronising him and he was simultaneously feeling both heartwarmingly endeared and infuriated, with a burning urge to either smile in second hand embarrassment or kick him in knees. 

 _“So whenever you feel ready,”_ onto said knees, Lance dropped and skidded across the floor, coming to a stop at the foot of Keith’s sofa and spreading his arms with a flourish, and Keith decided that the bruises Lance was going to get from that particular move were entirely deserved, “ _\- because we’re ready for you today.”_

Music ended on a final little swirl, appealing for Keith to listen.

Silence descended like a curtain.

As Lance, Pidge and Hunk finally came to a stop, breathing heavily and dripping sweat down their faces and necks, damp patches blossoming in their armpits, the strange tension pinning Keith to the sofa finally vanished.

Not wasting a second more, Keith moved. He leapt up from the sofa. Slowly, deliberately, looking Lance dead in the eyes, he etched his furious parting message, then turned around the blackboard and thrust it into Lance’s face, capital letters stamped in blazing red: BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO ZARKON WHEN HE SHOWS UP – AGGRESSIVELY DANCE AT HIM UNTIL HE GIVES IN.

Then he fled the common room. He didn’t care that he was fleeing with a timing as if it was a planned part of the song and dance routine, or running because the neurotoxins finally said he could.

Behind him, after wheezing complaints at Keith’s ungrateful soul for running away when they were all being _so supportive_ of him and his obvious singing insecurities, Lance flopped onto the sofa, alongside Hunk and Pidge, utterly exhausted, and closed his eyes. Singing and dancing all your major conversations of the day had really taken it out of him. It wouldn’t hurt to get a little lion-nap in before dinner.

There was a faint smell of smoke hanging in the air.


	2. Someday Homeward Bound/ Someday (Pidge Reprise)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Wei-Brordi are helpful. Shiro sings a downer. Pidge solos for Green.  
> And it might all be Keith's fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, again, partners in crime! Well, what can I say? Thank you so much for all your comments and kudoes last time. ;) I was really beyond chuffed with the response. I thought this would only be me beating out my broadway corner, so the support was so exciting and I can only hope to deliver something we can all find fun together. It's been fun for me at least! 
> 
> This chapter was brought to you on the back of Rent, La La Land, Aida, many broadway medleys and, 90s classic that aged about as well as crop tops and tamagochis, The Swan Princess. 
> 
> It's a touch melancholy and Keith expresses himself in CAPITALS.

“ _Keith,”_ Shiro sang, knocking against the door, then flinched as his baritone echoed down the corridor, his face red hot with embarrassment, “ _I know you’re in there.”_

He didn’t hear any approaching steps, but Keith had always been deft on his feet. There was, however, an answering series of knocks from the other side. _Ah,_ Shiro smiled, _morse code._

 _If I come out there,_ Keith tapped, each sound crisp and curt, _and Lance sings The Closet Song (Refrain) at me one more time –_

 _He promises not to,_ Shiro assured him, tapping back with the knuckle of his prosthetic index finger, _or else I’ll have him do an extra thirty press-ups before every meal for the next three days. I just came to tell you that we entered the Gallubean system five vargas ago and that we’re due for a talk with a representative of the Wei-Brordi in one. The Princess wants the paladins assembled on the bridge in full armour for the call. Look smart. We want to make a good impression._

_Yes, sir._

Shiro left and Keith realised that it went without saying what sort of the impression the towel-gag would make. He swallowed, his heart sinking. Maybe he could stuff his bayard in his mouth and claim that it was cultural – a sign of respect, or warriorhood amongst ‘his people’, to present his weapon between his teeth. If the others didn’t do it, he was supposedly part-Galra. He could always, truthfully (in case the Wei-Brordi had some advanced truth detection algorithm), claim that they he wasn’t of the same ‘people’ as they were.

The thought left a sharp, sour taste in his mouth.

Keith got dressed in silence. He thought, at some point, that he head Pidge go down the corridor past his room, whistling a repeat of a song she, Lance and Hunk had sang over making dinner, and by the rhythm of her steps, she was dancing. 

He bit down on his tongue and focused on the pain. The pain made him angry, or angrier than he already was. Good. Anger was good, better than fear, better than the spiralling, lost feeling of uncertainty, of not being in control – and if he kept it vague and general, just a simmering anger at _everything_ without a target, it was difficult to make a song and dance number out of.

 _Ah, Keith!_ Allura greeted him when he arrived on the bridge, holding up her blackboard. Not for the first time he wondered what language she was writing in. Maybe there was some kind of automatic translator illusion being projected at him from the blackboards. Perhaps Pidge would know. It seemed like the sort of thing she’d have investigated as soon as she got the alone time for it. _Excellent! Just in time. We are about to receive transmissions._

Chirpy music fading off into silence told Keith that he had arrived spot on at the end of some kind of dance routine. Lance and Hunk were rising from the floor and brushing dust from their knees. Shiro was lowering jazz hands.

Catching Keith’s eye across the room, Shiro sighed and pointed at the blackboard about his neck: _The Getting Ready for a Transmission Song – you didn’t miss much._

Pidge, however, was sniffing the air with a frown. She held up her board. _Is it just me or can anybody else smell smoke in here?_

Hunk paused and sniffed too. _Now that you mention it –_

 _“Incoming call being received!”_ Coran called from the control panel. “ _Look your Paladin-best, or we’ll not be believed!”_

Keith cringed but got in line, helmet tucked under arm, as a video transmission expanded across the holographic panel to reveal what looked like an over-sized jewel-petalled trumpet lily atop a glittering mound of sequinned peacock feathers.

A moment later, the trumpet lily stretched towards the camera on a thick green stalk of a neck, and Keith realised that the trumpet lily ‘petals’ were fleshy lobes of pale orange bone and skin. The blue-black beads studded across their surface were hundreds of tiny round eyes. The ribbon curling from the ‘lily’ heart was a thin, black coiling tongue. It was ringed in a circle of red hook-like teeth.

“GREETINGS, ALLURA, PRINCESS, AND PALADINS OF VOLTRON,” boomed a voice from the speakers, female, and Pidge made a small noise of appreciation at the Castle Ship’s translation algorithm, because there was no way that trumpet lily lipless mouth could have been making any sort of human-like noises, let alone words. “HONOURED ARE WE TO RECEIVE YOUR REQUEST FOR HELP. OPHANTA AM I, TRUMPET PRIME OF THE WEI-BRORDI. OF SERVICE, HOW MAY THE WEI-BRORDI BE? ”

Allura cleared her throat and sang, “ _Ophanta, we thank you for responding to our call. We landed on – “_

“NO!” gasped Ophanta, reeling back from the camera, brilliant green feathers curling up from her shoulders to cover her flesh-petals. “IT CANNOT BE!”

Behind her, a team of assembled Wei-Brordi, possibly warriors, echoed, “ _It cannot be!”_ like a chorus of doom and flailed.

Quivering, Ophanta returned to the camera, the fronds of her feathers undulating with agitation. “TELL ME, O PRINCESS, THAT TO THE MOON GALLUBE-36 YOU HAVE NOT BEEN?”

Allura exchanged a look with Shiro then held up her blackboard with its pink script. _We visited Gallube-36 recently to gather lithosphagna crystals necessary for our ship. What intelligence we had claimed the moon to be abandoned and no longer under Wei-Brordi jurisdiction. If, however, we were mistaken and we have trespassed in Wei-Brordi astrospace –_

“NO, NO, TRESPASS THIS IS NOT, AND SUCH TRESPASS WOULD CONCERN US NOT, BUT THE MOON GALLUBE-36 CONCERNS US GREATLY.”

_We discovered a fungus there unknown to our database –_

But before Allura had even finished writing, Ophanta was already speaking and the translator embellished what she said with sobs, “A PROSPEROUS COLONY ONCE WAS GALLUBE-36. FOR THREE THOUSAND YEARS, THE FINEST LITHOSPHAGNA MOSS IN THE UNIVERSE IT GREW, BUT A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, STRUCK IT WAS!” The Wei-Brordi behind Ophanta gasped together. “BY A PLAGUE MOST TERRIBLE! THE FLAMING DEATHSONG FUNGUS! A MOULD MOST EVIL THAT CONSUMED ALL CROPS OF LITHOSPHAGNA MOSS AND DESTROYED THE COLONY OF GALLUBE-36! WOE ARE THEY WHO TAKE UNTO THE TEMPLES OF THEIR BODIES THOSE SPORES OF MUSICAL HELL!”

Shiro held up his blackboard. _How exactly did this fungus ‘destroy the colony’ of Gallube-36?_

Ophanta shuddered, lifting feathers to her highest flesh lobes. “IN SEVEN DAYS OF SINGING, DANCING, MUSIC, INSANITY AND FIRE.”

 _Whoa, wait,_ Hunk tapped his board to clear it, then held it up again with huge yellow letters, _did you just say ‘fire’?_

“YES. FIRE. A RAPID PROCESS OF OXIDATION RESULTING IN VIOLENT ENERGY RELEASE TYPICALLY IN THE FORMS OF HEAT AND LIGHT.”  Ophanta paused as if to make sure that the paladins had understood, just in case whatever primitive planet they had hailed from had yet to discover fire. Her black tongue flicked and curled up tight. “MORE SPECIFICALLY, A SMALL PORTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE GALLUBE-36 COLONY DIED OF SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION.”

“WHAT!?” chorused the paladins in perfect harmony, even Keith.

Brass blared all around in a dramatic scream.

“WRITTEN IN OUR ANNALS IS IT. SURVIVORS FROM THE COLONY CAME TO US, SEEKING REFUGE AND TREATMENT. THEIR ACCOUNTS, STORED IN OUR ARCHIVES ARE THEY.” Ophanta’s voice turned watery and she sobbed. “THEY MAKE THE MOST DRAMATIC AND TRAGIC TALES AND HAVE INSPIRED MANY GREAT WORKS OF HOLOTAPE AND LITERATURE. WHILST EXHAUSTION, DEHYDRATION, UNINTENTIONAL LEAPS OFF CLIFFS, THE USE OF INAPPROPRIATE OBJECTS AS MICROPHONES AND OTHER TRAGIC ACCIDENTS DUE TO DISTRACTION TOOK THE LIVES OF THE MAJORITY, A SMALL NUMBER INTO FLAMES, MOST DRAMATICALLY AND EXCRUCIATINGLY PAINFULLY, BURST.

“FROM ACCEPTING THE REFUGEES, HOWEVER, WE SOON LEARNED THAT ALL AFFECTED BY THE SPORES WOULD, IN TIME, IF UNTREATED, THIS AWFUL FATE MEET.” Ophanta’s tongue swept out across her eyes. Lance made a small gagging noise in the back of his throat. “PRINCESS, PALADINS, OUR SYMPATHIES YOU HAVE.”

The paladins looked amongst themselves. Silence swelled in the bridge.

Pidge held up her sign, _Well, I guess that explains the smoke smell._

 _I always knew I was smoking hot when I danced._ As the others all groaned, Lance flipped over his blackboard and held it up for Ophanta to see. _If the colony refugees went to you guys for treatment that means you have a cure, right?_

Ophanta’s petals rippled and something in her demeanour, as hard as it was to tell with an alien species that looked like a cross between a compost heap and a ball-gown, seemed to relax. “AN ANTI-FUNGAL TREATMENT FOR THE FLAMING DEATHSONG WE HAVE AND PROVIDE IT WE CAN. IF THAT IS WHAT VOLTRON SEEKS OF US, THEN GLADLY GIVE IT WE WILL ON ONE CONDITION.”

 _We will be prepared to abide by any condition within reason,_ Allura was quick to reply and Ophanta rippled again with a full-body shiver that Keith guessed was the Wei-Brordi equivalent of a nod.

“WE WILL PROVIDE VOLTRON WITH THE TREATMENT KIT, ALL THE RELEVANT RESEARCH PAPERS AND ACCOUNTS OF THE FALL OF GALLUBE-36 IN EXCHANGE FOR VOLTRON’S WITHDRAWAL FROM THE GALLUBEAN SYSTEM AND VOW TO NOT RETURN.” Ophanta’s tone was firm. Her orange flesh-petals opened and closed like flexing fingers. “AS MUCH AS AN HONOUR AS IT IS TO WELCOME VOLTRON, WE DO NOT WELCOME WAR WITH THE GALRA EMPIRE. YOUR PRESENCE IN OUR ASTROSPACE WOULD DRAW DANGEROUS ATTENTION TO US. WE HAVE ESCAPED ZARKON SO FAR, IN PART THROUGH BEING TOO INSIGNIFICANT AND PEACEFUL A PEOPLE TO GAIN ANY ACCLAIM IN CONQUERING AND IN PART THROUGH RUMOURS OF THE FLAMING DEATHSONG FUNGUS.

“OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS, LONG BEFORE GALLUBE-36, MAY HAVE, ACCORDING TO TALES, A VARIANT OF THE DEATHSONG UPON THE GALRA UNLEASHED.” Ophanta’s tongue flicked out and again swept across her petals, but this time it looked more as if she was lipping her lips. “IT IS SAID THAT THE GALRA TOOK VERY WELL TO THE FLAMES. VERY BRIGHTLY THEY BURNED. VERY RAPIDLY.

“BUT TIMES HAVE CHANGED AND NO LONGER ARE WE A PEOPLE WHO FIGHT OR RESORT TO SUCH TACTICS. WE WOULD PREFER NEITHER TO CHALLENGE NOR PROVOKE THE GALRA. WE WILL NOT FIGHT.”

And yet they had hailed Voltron, welcomed them as fighters.

It grated something in Keith that there could be people like this - content to take a back seat and watch others go forth to fight a war for them, luxuriating in the neutrality that their distance from the fighting afforded them and demanding that its ugliness stayed away from their doorstep.

True, it was difficult to imagine Ophanta and her flower-feather-duster attendants fighting. Almost certainly, she was trying to do what was best for her people, but the way Keith saw it, the Wei-Brordi had already as good as surrendered their portion of the universe to Zarkon. They may not welcome war with the Galra Empire, but the Galra Empire would never give the Wei-Brordi such a luxury of choice. Zarkon gave nothing. He only took. He would bring his Empire, bring war, to the Wei-Brordi, whether they wanted it or not, and take whatever he wanted.

Allura, chewing her lip, seemed to be thinking something similar. Eyes narrowed, she very briefly glanced back to the rest of them, gauging their reactions. When each gave her a small nod of encouragement, silently trusting her judgement, she held up her blackboard.  

 _We accept the condition and will leave as soon as we have received aid._ She flipped the board over, her expression fierce. _We cannot, however, vow to never return to this system. If the Wei-Brordi are ever in need of aid, Voltron will come back for you. Zarkon will not let this system go apparently unnoticed forever and we are here to stop him._

Ophanta turned to her attendants, her neck-stalk twisting, and chirped something unintelligible to the translator to which they replied with body-shivers. She returned to her camera. “HOW MANY ARE YOUR CREW THAT HAVE BEEN INFECTED?” Allura told her and Ophanta went on, “THEN SUITABLE QUANTITIES OF THE ANTI-FUNGALS PREPARED AND DROPPED OFF ON MOON GALLUBE-02 FOR YOUR CREW MEMBERS TO PICK-UP WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE VARGAS THEY WILL BE. ONCE THE DROP HAS BEEN MADE, THE COORDINATES I SHALL SEND. A FEW OF MY MEN WILL AWAIT YOU AT THE SITE. RELEVANT RESEARCH REGARDING THE DEATHSONG WE SHALL BEGIN TRANSMITTING IMMEDIATELY.”

“ _Thank you, Ophanta, Trumpet Prime_.”

Ophanta shuddered and it looked to Keith as half in sympathy, half in revulsion. “TO SING AND DANCE, TO POUR YOUR HEARTS AND SOULS OUT NAKED FOR THE UNIVERSE TO SEE AND HEAR, I WOULD NOT WISH SUCH A TORMENT UPON THE WORST ENEMIES OF MY PEOPLE. GOOD LUCK, PRINCESS AND PALADINS.”

* * *

 

The Wei-Brordi were as good as their word.

In less than three vargas, Ophanta contacted Allura with the coordinates for a remote moon. Always mindful that it could be a trap, Pidge took the Green Lion with its invisibility cloak to scout out the moon first then hide in a crater as back-up. When she signalled an initial all-clear, Hunk and Lance flew Yellow and Blue to pick up the Wei-Brordi’s treatment kits and carried Keith and Shiro with them to help with loading.

Not even Lance sung on the way to the pick-up. Apparently the threat of eventual spontaneous combustion if there was no available working cure was a _very_ effective threat.

But once they had met the Wei-Brordi representatives in their strange tent-like spacesuits, finished loading the Deathsong anti-fungals and fungicides for the ship and Shiro had scanned the kits with a gadget Coran had dug up from the Castle Ship’s laboratories to confirm their chemical composition was as Ophanta had promised, the journey back to the Castle Ship was a different story.

 _“This,”_ Lance sang into the comms, “ _is all Keith’s fault.”_

Lance was so, so very lucky that it was Shiro on board with him in Blue and that Keith was flying with Hunk.

Hunk frowned and obligingly sang back, “ _Why is it Keith’s fault?”_

_“Because he’s the one who found those crystals in that crazy-spooky vault.”_

_“I wouldn’t call it a vault, it was more like a cave,”_ Pidge chimed in, whilst Keith gripped the blackboard between his fingers, forcing back song as it welled up his throat, and earning an oddly pitying look from Hunk, _“but now come to think of it, it was probably a mass grave.”_

 _“Oh, yeah, there were those plant heaps that looked kind of burnt,”_ Lance recalled, violins plucking behind his voice, raising goosebumps all over Keith’s skin. The caves where Coran’s scanners had led them in their crystal hunt had been filled with slouching heaps of what Keith had taken to be charred, freakishly ossified plants, but now that he had seen what the Wei-Brordi looked like… “ _So they were all colony plague skeletons. Now we’ve learned.”_

_“Lance, maybe a little more reverence for the Wei-Brordi dead, especially since their descendants have, so far, only helped us, just as they said they would.”_

_“Sorry, Shiro, - you’re right, but can we agree on this one thing?”_ A simple curious piano note. _“Don’t you want to hear Keith sing?”_

The piano tapped out the moments.

Shiro looked up to Hunk and Keith’s feed. Prosthetic hand rose to chin. He considered Keith with a squint that made Keith’s heart sink.

More impatient piano.

Joined by thoughtfully plucking cello.

Then Shiro smiled and leaned nonchalantly against the Lance’s head-rest, and Lance’s grin spread wide and bright as butter as Pidge cackled over the comms.

Shooting Shiro the filthiest look Keith could dredge from the depths of his betrayed soul, he mouthed, ‘Traitor.’

_So much for Shiro almost rhyming with ‘hero’._

The music shifted keys and tugged for Keith’s attention, and Shiro was doing absolutely nothing to stop it. Oh, Keith saw how it was. Now that the paladins had treatment within their reach and they knew that the whole situation was only temporary, Shiro had decided to embrace the singing and dancing whilst he still had a chance.

A new beat established itself in Blue’s cockpit and across Yellow’s speakers, making Lance sway at Blue’s control panel until the feed from Blue suddenly vanished in a flash of purple-white.

And when the feed returned, Lance whooped and Hunk whistled, because there, cradled in Shiro’s arms, was now a bright, shining white cello, and Shiro was playing it as though, not only was the cello real and not a product of group-coordinated hallucination, but like he actually knew what he was doing, when Keith knew for a fact that Shiro didn’t.

 _“Someday, Keith,”_ he sung, sawing the bow over strings, and Shiro’s dream cello _sang_ with him, and it might have all been beautiful if it wasn’t because of a mould known as ‘the Flaming Deathsong’, “ _when we’re all homeward bound, you’ll look back to the stars, and I hope you’ll be proud – “_

 _“Of all the butt that we kicked,”_ Lance contributed, adding slyly, “ _and all the fights that we picked – like Klaizap.”_

Hunk snorted and Keith’s face warmed with incredulity. Had Lance really learnt nothing after being tasered by Pidge’s bayard? Had he learnt nothing from simply being around _Pidge?_ The size of the warrior said nothing about how dangerous they could be! All they needed was the right tools and skill sets. He –

 _Ah, right,_ Keith realised, just as Hunk reached over to pat him on the shoulder. Lance was just winding Keith up again.

Shiro’s song wasn’t exactly a ballad. There was a wry sense of humour in it, but there was definitely something a little offbeat and whimsical that fit his voice absolutely perfectly. He was sitting on a stool apparently conjured up out of nowhere to play the cello, the same white as the instrument.

Keith sighed. Only Shiro could look so serene playing a hallucinated cello whilst sitting on a hallucinated stool _._ He was putting his thigh muscles through a song-long deep squat.

“ _But the stories that’ll make us gather round,”_ Shiro continued, “a _nd make us miss space and all that we found here, will be the weird ones – mark my words, Keith. It’ll be the weird ones.”_

 _“The weird ones,”_ echoed Pidge and Lance over the comms. “ _Ooooh, you won’t forget the weird ones.”_

_“And this Deathsong space mould is definitely weird.”_

“ _But before we get aged, decrepit, grey in the beard -  “_ Lance twirled a finger in an invisible clip of sagely facial hair. 

_“ - we might as well enjoy it,”_ Shiro took up the tune again, “ _this story whilst it’s with us,_

_“Make the most of the moment rather than let the moment use us.”_

The music took on a sudden softly melancholic gentleness. The switch in the mood caught all of them surprise, shrinking the grin on Lance’s face to something small and turned inwards, drawing a sigh from Pidge, and sinking Hunk and Keith into thoughtful quiet.

It caught even Shiro, back to sliding the bow across the glowing cello’s strings, by surprise. It was fleeting, but Keith saw it – a frown, mouth corners turning down, a flash of uncertainty at having let something slip that might have been more revealing than Shiro had been prepared for.

 _“Someday, when we’re homeward bound, this moment would have passed,”_ Shiro sang and Lance hummed in quiet supportive harmony, piano weaving with cello and unseen instruments Keith was too keyed up to identify with his ears alone, “ _And all the laughs you could have shared, would still be locked up in your heart,_

 _“So you might as well enjoy it whilst our story’s still at its start.”_ Shiro had been smiling wryly throughout his song as if secretly enjoying it but at some point, as the melody slowed, it had faded. _“Because who knows when this story will pull us all apart.”_

Music echoed over the comms, trickled between the whirring hum of the Lions and the blinking lights of their panels.

And then Lance swivelled in his seat to hold up his blackboard. _Man, Shiro, your song’s kind of a downer._

Shiro let out a sheepish laugh and, a moment later, Lance, Hunk and Pidge followed, snickering and chuckling through the speakers.

Scratching the back of his head, Shiro looked into the camera, at Keith. From the apologetic smile, at least Shiro seemed to understand now a portion of Keith’s reluctance. Well, it served him right.

The cello vanished, as did the stool. Shiro straightened and then instantly groaned.

Voice drawn high with pain, he sang, “ _My thighs!”_

When none of the paladins would stop laughing for a minute straight, a very red-faced Shiro stretched around Lance and switched off Blue’s comm-link and camera-feed.

* * *

 

Several minutes of wheezing and breathless sniggers later, Hunk held up the blackboard. _Can you smell smoke in here?_

Keith had been trying to ignore it, that along with an itching warmth under his skin he had blamed on the adrenaline buzz of stepping out onto an unknown moon to meet strange aliens without being able to burn it off in a fight.

But the smell of smoke was undeniable in the cockpit. It wasn’t wood-smoke, or meat-smoke but something cleaner, purer. Less, in fact, like smoke than it was simply _burning._

Ophanta’s warning of spontaneous combustion rang in his mind as clear as the piano notes threading through Shiro’s cello.

Keith held up his board: YES.

Hunk scanned Yellow’s holoscreens. _Well, nothing’s wrong with Yellow._

The Castle Ship loomed in a teal-lit mass of shadow before them.

Hunk turned over his board. _And you didn’t sing, and I didn’t sing that much. Actually, I was trying not to, seeing as you really didn’t want to sing and it’s easier to get swept up in the singing when somebody’s singing right next to you._

That was more considerate than Keith had been expecting, although not completely a surprise. Hunk tended to the considerate side, after all. It was just different having that sort of consideration aimed at Keith, something he was still getting used to.

THANK YOU.

 _No problem. Didn’t want to make you uncomfortable and snowball you all up in a song and dance you didn’t want to be part of._ The holoscreens showed that Shiro and Lance had already docked in Blue’s hangar and left Blue’s cockpit. Pidge with Green had done the same. Hunk flipped the blackboard over. _I get that you’re a private kind of guy. If you don’t want things to get out, then you shouldn’t have those things forced out of you. This space mould doesn’t force us per se but it definitely can trick us into crossing lines we normally wouldn’t if there wasn’t BGM leading us on. It’s not fair._

NO, IT ISN’T.

_Well, at least we have the cure, so it’s not going kill us if we do sing for the next couple of days._

I’M NOT TAKING ANY CHANCES.

Hunk laughed and, as Yellow’s hangar doors opened, unclipped his stylus to respond but in the glare of the landing lights in the doorway, the black surface of his board suddenly gleamed like a dark mirror and he stiffened.

Stopped. Stared.

With Hunk hunched over his blackboard, Keith couldn’t see what was wrong. Maybe it had malfunctioned and started regurgitating dirty secrets that had been written on these things in the past. They looked like the sort of thing Altean children might have used in schoolrooms when they weren’t busy destroying gladiators.

Just as Keith was about to tap Hunk on the shoulder and do as Shiro often advised him to, which was, when he wanted answers, to simply ask, Hunk spun round, eyes wide and fearful, staring up into Keith’s face.

Tentatively angling the blackboard so that the hangar lights caught it just right again, Hunk turned it to Keith.

Then he drew arrows around Keith’s reflection in the black Altean-tech surface, labelling it with huge yellow exclamation marks.

_!!!!!!!_

Pulling off his helmet, Keith raised a hand to his face. The reflection did the same. It touched the skin just below his jaw.

All around Keith’s mouth was a web of fine glowing red lines – blood vessels, he realised, burning under his skin, like cracks in volcanic rock as the magma swelled and pushed up from below.

Cracks. He looked as if he was cracking.

Cracks all down his jaw. Cracks stretching down his throat. He swallowed and molten red lines swelled through the black mesh of his underarmour, shining dully in his reflection in Hunk’s blackboard. His skin where the blood vessels glowed _itched_ with heat.

 _Oh, man, Keith,_ Hunk wrote in small, shaky letters, drawing even more arrows pointing at Keith’s reflection as if to emphasise his point, _are you sure it’s not killing you NOT singing?_

* * *

 

Shiro may have switched off the feed from Blue to the other lions, but in the Green Lion’s cockpit the music continued.

Pidge manoeuvred Green alongside the Castle Ship. The last note of Shiro’s cello hung on, clinging to the quiet. She was waiting for it to continue. It was curiosity mostly. Some things had to be experienced to be known. The more of this space mould’s musical she could experience, the more she could know, and now they had the Wei-Brordi’s treatment kit, her chances to observe the effects of the space mould were limited.

So far, it had been _fascinating_. When it came to dancing, Pidge knew that she didn’t have a single coordinated bone in her body but, between the seven of them hallucinating, they could get through a group dance routine with not even one of them tripping over their feet. She had a theory that it had something to do with the ‘semi-telepathic’ aspect of the mould. It pooled their abilities and averaged them, so they had Lance’s sense of rhythm, Hunk’s steadiness on his feet, Allura’s balletic grace (and possibly knowledge of Altean ballet, from how many times Pidge had pirouetted since this all started), Coran’s ballroom flourishes, and, however reluctant Keith was to sing, possibly a portion of his agility and self-awareness. As for what they were getting from Shiro, Pidge had her suspicions. Those terrible rhymes couldn’t entirely be Lance’s fault.

And from Pidge? What were they getting from her?

Easy. Somebody had to be mixing the music into something half-decent in their heads. Matt had had a phase with an electric violin that, if there was a god, ought to have been wiped clean from her memory, but alas, the gods were either indifferent or absent, so she was stuck with it. Pidge had been forced (cough cough _forced_ ) to get her own revenge, and that had involved mixing his various cat-yowling noises into something like an advertising jingle, complete with Matt’s voice auto-tuned over the top, that she set to blast on full volume as his messenger ringtone to humiliate him in public.

If she could mix and auto-tune Matt’s electric violin, she could mix some neurotoxin-induced audiosomatic semi-telepathic hallucinations _easy_.

The cello faded, and then its tune was taken over by an oboe in a deft musical baton touch.

And something about the thin, reedy sound of the oboe made the expanse of space she could just see above the rim of the hangar doors suddenly seem impossibly _spacious._ Too wide, too large, with too many stars, and too many dark places that weren’t even places tucked in between.

And somewhere out there were Dad and Matt.

Pidge gripped the controls. Green rustled at the back of her mind, her presence both simple in the emotion it conveyed whilst wrapping her up in an organised complexity that was so _patterned_ it was almost soothing.

Almost. There was always a part of the blossoming fractals Green pressed on Pidge through their bond that was a little too alien not to be a touch exciting, but Pidge let Green know that the sentiment was appreciated.

 _Try the song_ , Green’s fractal patterns shifted in shapes that reminded Pidge of first broccoli then pine cones, _it’ll be interesting. It’ll be new. You’ll have new questions to think about. Where your father and brother are, you don’t have the information to answer that yet._

Pidge glanced at the panels, saw Hunk and Keith having a silent exchange with their blackboards, Shiro and Lance’s feed still dark as Shiro dealt with thigh-cramps, then switched off her own feed to the other lions. There was nothing to worry about and unlikely to be anything urgent they needed to communicate between them all in the next few minutes. Green was already entering her hangar anyway.

She cleared her throat self-consciously then felt more than a little ridiculous for doing so. It was just her. She was alone. It was no different from humming along to her favourite tunes in her head when she sorted through Galra data in the dead of the night in her room whilst everyone else was asleep.

Green’s fractal patterns bloomed in warm kaleidoscope shapes and Pidge smiled.

Okay, maybe she wasn’t quite alone. Green wouldn’t judge her for a little solo, would she?

And didn’t that just pique Green’s curiosity, fractals glimmering yellow-green.

Pidge patted the control panel and breathed. The oboe shaped out the vastness of space but, with Green there, it didn’t seem so overwhelmingly empty.

 _“Someday, one day I’ll be homeward bound,”_ it was the same tune as Shiro, except smaller, quieter, like something shared just between Pidge and her lion ought to be, “ _I’ll take back my dad and my brother and fly them in Green,_

_“I’ll hack open our front door - Mum will probably scream.”_

Better than crying. Pidge hated seeing Mum cry. The song paused long enough to let her laugh, before carrying on.

_“But I’ll say, ‘Look who I found!’ and we’ll all tell her about everything we’ve seen.”_

Maybe not everything, at least at the start, if Dad and Matt didn’t want to relive whatever it was Zarkon was putting them through right now, wherever they were, out there.

“ _And that we’re sorry for leaving her alone for so long.”_

Pidge drew in a shaky breath and as Green touched down in the hangar and the doors closed behind them, she patted the control panel again, getting a contented fractal flicker in turn. 

_“Green, I’ll introduce you. She’ll love you for sure,_

_You know, you’re exactly the same colour of this coat that she wore,_

_Mum called it her ‘Clover Coat’, she wore it for luck, on my test day, their launch day…”_

She trailed off and so did the music, as if in sympathy, which Pidge didn’t want, so she decided it was giving her space.

Green, lights still blinking even though they had come to a stop, gave her a gentle nudge with a fern-like pattern in greens and blacks.

_“I don’t believe in luck, Green, not anymore.”_

Pidge pulled off her helmet and sat back in the pilot’s seat, turning it over in her hands.

 _“I don’t believe in gods either but sometimes,”_ Pidge grimaced, face warm, and scratched at her nose, “ _I, kind of, pray,_

_“And hope for Mum that everything turns out okay.”_

Giving Green another pat, Pidge left the cockpit with her helmet under her arm. Green lowered a ramp and let her walk out onto the hangar floor.

The music, however, wasn’t finished with them yet. The oboe trailed after Pidge until she sighed, closed her eyes and turned back to Green.

“ _But after seeing all that there is,”_ although all of the lion’s lights were dimmed, Pidge felt Green looking back at her with an earnest, vibrant focus, “ _will I ever really be able to go home?”_

The fractals feathered and spun in Pidge’s mind, quietly questioning patterns, trying to understand.

_“We’re just five humans out in space, two Alteans ten millennia out of place.”_

Pidge looked down at the helmet in her hands.

_“Will we really make it? Will any of us ever really make it home?”_

Green’s patterns grew and spread in sharp petals of reassurance, but underneath it all she didn’t have any answers.

They would just have to find the answers together, the hard way.

Through experiencing it.

Pidge cracked a smile and Green’s fractals swirled _._

Despite the melancholic tune flowing around them, Pidge felt lighter, as if she had breathed out some super-massive cosmic gas from her chest. She had sung something weighing her down out of her system as though cleaning out a load of cumbersome internet cookies.

The music went into a final quiet repeat of Shiro’s tune and Pidge left Green behind to go to the door.

She held up her blackboard. _Thanks, Green._

As the lights dimmed sleepily down in the hangar, Pidge made a note to herself to erase all footage of this solo from the security cameras before Coran found it and added it to the ‘commemorative album’ .

Green’s broccoli patterns bloomed and spun.

That, the lion agreed, was a very good idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. Hopefully, next time, the songs will be better. There's one I've been planning for Keith and Shiro since the start that I'm really looking forward to getting down on paper!
> 
> I'm on tumblr at zenthisoror.tumblr.com if you're ever curious ~ come along to chat musicals, spontaneous combustion, writing and Voltron.


	3. Blade/My Brother from a Purple Mother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Extra tracks: The Cleaning Song & Keith's Problem is Being Keith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are with Chapter 3! Thank you so much to everybody who read and commented on the previous chapters. I'm going to get down to replying to those right now!  
> It's been a while in the writing but it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I had the end of Keith and Shiro's song sorted for ages, but leading up to it was tricky. Keith really did have too many things to sing about, so it was just working out what to cut for future songs. ;)   
> I love my broballads. I love kindness. I love gratitude. And I love those quiet, private moments in songs when it feels like all the world has hushed up to finally listen to the kid who has never had their most heartfelt thoughts listened to.

The tool Coran used to examine Keith, scanning his head and shoulders, looked like a signalling baton, with a small screen and a long clear tube filled with floating glowing blue spheres.  Keith sat as still as he possibly could and waited for Coran to finish.

In the meantime, he looked at Shiro, who was hovering beside Keith with his hands up in what was likely meant to be a calming gesture but all Keith saw was a goalkeeper ready to catch Keith’s flaming pieces if he exploded right there and then.

His skin itched and reached up to his neck to scratch it, only for Shiro to clear his throat and glare until Keith lowered it again.

“That’s got to hurt,” said Lance, whistling as he crossed the infirmary, and to Keith’s astonishment, he really did _say_ it. His voice was distorted under what the gas mask strapped over his face, but Lance was unmistakeably _speaking_. Not a hint of a song in his voice.

 Keith was impressed. It had only been ten minutes since Lance had belted the small yellow tank of aerosol fungicide to his hips and already it was a marked improvement.

 “Unless you’re, you know, numb on the outside as well as the inside.”

 “Which we all know he isn’t,” said Hunk quickly as if pinching out a light on a dynamite fuse. Then he stopped, eyes widening, and beaming with delight he pointed at his face. “I’m not singing!”

Pidge applauded from the other side of the unpacked treatment crate and returned to scrolling through the Wei-Brordi’s research on her laptop, but she was huffing into her mask with raspy breathing noises and smiling.

“Which he isn’t,” Lance agreed, testing the mask of the aerosol fungicide harness with a few experimental puffs to the back of his hand. “No matter how much he puts up the ‘I’m-aloof-and-fireproof- grrr-roll-of-thunder-hear-me-howl-I-was-raised-by-desert-wolves’ tough guy act. Here you go, Shiro.”

“Thanks, Lance.”

Keith held up his blackboard. IT DOESN’T HURT _._

Lance frowned. “Keith, you look like you swallowed a bomb _,_ like I could kick you and you’d fart the Manhattan Project.”

IT DOESN’T HURT _,_ Keith emphasised, slapping the board with his hand.

Really, he almost wished that it did. Keith could see himself in the steel panels of the infirmary cabinets. The blood vessels under his skin glowed in angry red lines. They ought to have been burning with liquid fire, but all Keith felt was a prickling-crawling throughout his skin, as though he had sucked in too much air, a breath too big, and it all wanted was to burst out from him in a scream.

 _Scream_ , thought Keith, somewhat desperately, as Coran scanned him and hummed into his moustache, _if only_.

Gulping aerosol fungicide and tank strapped to his hip, Shiro returned to Keith’s side. He asked Coran, “Are we sure that we can’t use the healing pods for this?”

 “I’m afraid not. The healing pods are designed to accelerate and facilitate the replication and replenishment of the body’s own cells. They’re for cellular regeneration, within limits.” Coran’s eyes flickered to the seam between metal and flesh in Shiro’s right arm with regret. The scanner let out an obnoxious _bleep_ and Coran hurriedly returned his attention to the miniature screen. “But not surface infections. After all, we wouldn’t want them killing off your microbiome and disrupting your metabolic and hormonal homeostasis! It’d severely unbalance your brain chemistry, as well as ruin the efficiency of your digestive tract. And that’s your scan done, Number Four!”

Keith couldn’t write fast enough. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?

“Quintessence disequilibrium. It’s a…hmm, unusual reaction to the Deathsong neurotoxins.”

“According to the Wei-Brordi’s research, the Deathsong works by boosting our quintessence levels. It actually might even be good for people in small doses,” Pidge read off the research papers with a tone of wonder, which Keith would have minded far less if she hadn’t paused on a photograph of an ancient mural depicting a Gallube-36 colonist flailing its fern-feathers and dying in burst of fire in orange paint. Nice. “Before the mutant version destroyed them all, apparently there’s evidence to suggest that the colonists might have been growing the mould for recreational purposes.”

“Wait a dobash,” said Lance, holding up a finger, “so what you’re saying is, we’re not just infected by space mould we’re infected by – “

“Space magic mushrooms, if the whole semi-telepathic hallucination thing wasn’t already a giveaway, but that’s not the point. The point is, Keith’s overreacting to it. The Deathsong’s supposed to siphon off the spare quintessence we make from the boost it gives us, but Keith’s making too much, even for the mould to keep up with. And, on top of that,” Pidge considered Keith with narrowed eyes and adjusted her glasses, “he hasn’t been singing.”

WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH THIS?

“Basically, the Deathsong’s trying to keep us alive for as long as it can whilst it farms us for quintessence. It’s making us sing and dance to burn off excess and keep our quintessence levels stable,” Pidge shut her laptop, “so that we don’t burn up with it.”

“Although eventually all do seem to succumb to disequilibria,” said Allura, entering the infirmary just as Pidge clicked for another mural photograph, this time showing a parade of horrendous stick figures and artistic renditions of the last days of Gallube-36, which Keith really could have done without seeing. “What a terrible fate.”

Yes, what a terrible fate, and it was coming to Keith early because the universe not just enjoyed throwing curveballs at him, but aiming the pitching machine at him with malicious intent.

He wrote carefully, ignoring the bright glow of the veins he saw through the gaps in his fingerplates, SO I’M ALLERGIC TO THE MOULD?

 “No, you’re not, but since there’s no point in explaining this in terms you won’t understand, yes, if it’s going to give you peace of mind, you’re ‘quintessence-allergic’ to the mould.”

“Which, ah, seems to be a common Galra trait,” said Coran tentatively, drumming his fingers on the scanner but, to his credit, he didn’t avoid Keith’s gaze, “hence the Wei-Brordi’s use of it in the past as a bioweapon, but, never mind, young paladin! It won’t come to that.”

Footsteps approached – softly, softly, as if Keith could explode at any moment, which was, as a matter of fact, true - and then a heavy hand rested on Keith’s shoulder.

 “Keith,” said Shiro, and hadn’t Keith heard that tone many times before, in _Keith, don’t press button when I’m in the anti-gravity simulator ever again_ or _Keith, I may be on a special diet for the sake of science and the advancement of mankind’s endeavours into space, but, so help me God, could you please call the emergency number for a four cheese stuffed crust and the extra garlic dough balls,_ or most common and simple of all, _Keith, wait._ “Sing or die.”

Keith winced. Shiro was right. There was no arguing around this one _._

And at least it wasn’t the actual singing he had a problem with. Just the helplessness of feeling that he wasn’t in control, that he was being sucked out into empty space with not even familiar stars to guide his way.

Nothing had changed really, he knew that - just his own awareness of how little he knew and that apparently he could catch fire from quintessence allergies as good as any Galra.

His nails bit into his palms.

“Maybe if Keith takes the medicine he won’t have to sing anyway?” said Hunk, lighting a flicker of hope which was crushed an instant later when Pidge shook her head.

“Not a good idea. The Wei-Brordi’s stuff will take at least a week to clear the Deathsong from our systems and that’s not even counting for any complications that could come up from our different physiologies. The treatment course suggests singing whenever the mood takes us, just to be on the safe side.”

“But in the meantime, Hunk is quite correct,” Coran held up the fungicide harness with the gas mask hanging off it like a mermaid’s purse, and grinned encouragingly through his own. “It’s time you took your medicine!”

* * *

 

Ten minutes of breathing musty fungicide vapour, with top-notes of alien Teflon and rubber, the tension that had been tickling Keith’s diaphragm eased. He didn’t feel as though on the brink of singing his lungs out of his own body.

When he said as much Shiro had chuckled, muttered, “I’ll make sure to add that to my _Voltron Encyclopaedia of Horribly Painful Deaths in We Just Missed in Space_. It’ll make a change from updating the _Everything that Could Go Wrong with Airlocks_ chapter,” and gone to rescue Hunk, who had gotten between Lance and Pidge in an increasingly heated argument over unconscious gender bias and distribution of song themes. Allura and Coran had already returned to the bridge to send a message of gratitude back to the Wei-Brordi and begin preparing their next course of action.

Experimentally, Keith pulled down the mask, quietly cleared his throat, and opened his mouth.

…

Nothing.

Not even a soft _plink_ of a note from a group-hallucinated piano.

He could feel the songs on the tip of his tongue. If anything, the urge to open voice and sing was stronger than when he had been gagging himself with his towel, and yet, now when Keith was actually trying, not a sound came out of him.

He looked across the room, hoping that the others hadn’t noticed his failure. Thankfully, they hadn’t, although Shiro caught his eye and raised his eyebrows until Keith replaced the breathing mask on his face.

Typical.

Just when it came down to ‘Sing or die’, Keith couldn’t sing at all.

* * *

 The rest of the day -  the hours of illumination prescribed to maintain the paladins’ circadian rhythm and baseline sanity – was spent hunting down Deathsong spore bodies about the Castle Ship and scrubbing down every contaminated surface with a fungicide gel that left it sparkling clean, smelling of heather (space heather, as Lance insisted) and glowing radioactive green for three minutes afterwards.

It was a diversion of sorts. Physical activity Keith could throw himself into always was, but ultimately it was repetitive and not distracting enough to stop Keith’s mind wandering back to his own predicament, especially when all the scrubbing did was draw everybody’s attention to the glowing red lines now crackling under the skin of his arms.

Why? Why couldn’t he sing anymore? Why was it now that when he pushed himself to sing that the music and lyrics wouldn’t come to him, when before the music had all but ambushed him as soon as he opened his mouth?

“You know what this needs?” Lance dropped his rag into a bucket into his bucket. “A cleaning song.”

Pidge groaned from behind the goo-dispenser. “Lance, _no_.”

“Or a slave-drudgery song.”

And there it was - an obliging _plink!_

An opening note, soon followed by an orchestral motif foundation of a dreary dirge meant for the unjust suffering of thousands building pyramids or dragging ships for hard-hearted overlords.

Keith stopped scrubbing and stared.

“ _Fungus, fungus,”_ Lance sang, slapping the gelled rag to the side of the oven between the words, “ _death to all fungus_. _We scrub every surface till there’s no more among us. Deadliness is cleanliness, and we know when it’s clean, because it’ll be mean, glowing green and gamma ray pristine –_ Hey!”

“How are you doing that?”

Lance frowned and shook off Keith’s hand from his wrist. The music ground to a stop. “Doing what?”

As silence slipped into the place of the orchestral backing again, Keith’s face burned (although not with real fire) and he found himself tongue-tied. What was he really asking?

He huffed into the mask. “Getting this singing stuff to work.”

“What do you mean ‘getting it to work’? It’s space mould biology, Keith. Wacky brain toxins. You don’t need to think about it…” Lance trailed off and looked at him closely. “Wait, are you serious? You were practically eating your towel to stop it before.”

“Well, now isn’t before, and I can’t get it to work.” Even though he could feel the music welling up behind his teeth. “I’m trying and it isn’t working. And, like Shiro said, ‘sing or die’.”

Lance sat back on his heels, rag in hand, silent aside from the early 80s sci-fi fantasy breathing noises from his mask.

Then a wide, wicked grin spread across his face.

“You can’t sing.”

Oh, boy, Lance was going to milk this for all that it was worth.

“I want to. I can’t.”

“You freely admit that I, Lance the Tuneful, your eternal rival and nemesis have bested you, Keith the Tuneless, in spontaneous musicality?”

“Bested me in letting space mould mess with our heads, but if it matters so much to you, yes!” Keith snapped and then instantly wished he hadn’t when the red glow of the veins down his arms flared quintessence-gold, and really did _burn._

He dropped his rag with a hiss, clutching his hands together as a thin silvery line of that strangely _clean-_ smelling smoke trickled up from between his fingers.

Lance’s smug grin instantly fell away. “Okay, okay! Sheesh, only you’d set yourself on fire over asking nicely for help like it’d actually kill you to be human for once.”

 “Well, I’m not all human, so it probably would.”

“Lance shoots and scores own goal,” said Pidge from her corner of the kitchen and despite the pain under his skin, now fading to a dull throb that was eerily close in time to his heartbeats, Keith snorted.

Lance winced. “Okay, I’ll take that, but you know what I mean.”

It was tempting to say he didn’t, just to rub in - how much none of them really knew anything out here in space. Even Allura and Coran were ten thousand years out of touch. Space was dark and the stars were cold and all the stars did was watch with the detached distance of things that were dead and gone. Maybe it was time for a new definition.

‘Human’ – adj.: Being too small for the universe and never knowing enough about anything.

And then needlessly worrying about it. You never caught moose or cats having existential crises.

“So, what it is?” Lance had put away the smug grin in favour of studying Keith, mouth twisted, eyes narrowed, like a puzzle. He tossed the rag from one hand to the other. “You don’t have anything to sing about?”

Keith thought about it then shook his head. “If you can make a song out of cleaning, I don’t think that’s it.”

“Or maybe you shouldn’t underestimate my extraordinary talent for tapping into the harmony of the universe and the musical flow of the moment, Can’t Sing Keith.”

 “Don’t call me that.”

 “Fine, fine, hackles down, O Mighty Swordsman.” Keith pretended that he didn’t notice the worried look Lance exchanged with Pidge behind his back. “What about backing singing? You could just follow mine or Pidge’s lead.”

 “I – er – tried. Just now. With that cleaning song, but I just couldn’t…” Keith focused on his knuckles as he scrubbed the floor. He was getting tongue-tied with for words, let alone lyrics, “…go with the flow of it?”

“Oh. _Oh!”_ Lance sat up straight and slapped the gel-rag in his right hand into the palm of the left. “I’ve got it. I’ve totally got it.”

 “You have?”

“It’s so damn obvious!” Lance tugged down his own mask, pointed at Keith who regretted in an instant sounding so _hopeful,_ and sang, “ _It’s you!_ _You’re you!_ _It’s you being all you!_ ”

The band started up and all Keith could do was splutter as Lance stood, stepped back and twirled on the spot, coming back to face Keith again with the fungicide gel encrusted rag held out like a baton.

 “ _Bet you’re thinking, what’s that supposed to mean? It’s just Lance being a drama queen. But I’ve done my maths and seen it through, and, Keithy boy, it’s just you - being all Keithy you. See?”_

 The music paused, as though offering Keith the moment to pitch in with song. Sheepishly, feeling Pidge’s bemused gaze on both of them from her corner, Keith pulled down his face mask and breathed in through his nose.

He opened his mouth and choked as song, lyric, all his frustration and fear and everything, crowded up his throat.  Smoke trickled up from under his collar and up his arms. Veins glowed.  

Lance nodded, his theory proven. _“Three things, Keith, three things from the top. One, you just don’t know when to stop. You’re always go, go, go and do, do, do. You don’t take the time to sort your head through, so when you start singing, you’re trying to spit out every single damn thing you could possibly sing about,”_ Lance flung out his hands, waved then closed them to fists at his mouth, watching Keith over his knuckles to make sure he had his attention, “ _at once.”_

Spot on.

Keith had been struggling to find the right words because there were too many things, too many thoughts, too many things he _needed_ to do or _wanted_ to do or was afraid he couldn’t do, too much to sort through and pick out exactly what the _right_ words were, especially through the thick haze of mounting exasperation and anger at his own self for not being able to solve it all alone.

A dozen different indignant, angry, confused, startled responses crowded his mouth.

Lance carried on. _“You’re too impatient. I’m no Shiro replacement, but you’ve got to focus to the max. Find your zen locus, and chillax.”_

“Yes!” Lance and Keith both turned to find Pidge lowering her fist with a triumphant smirk. “Hunk and I have a bet going on what words are going to get used before all this is over.”

 _“Two,”_ Lance went on, snapping his fingers so that Keith looked his way and the group-hallucinated band struck up, “ _listen to the water boy, you’ve got to loosen up. You can’t go with the flow until you’ve let it go. Shake out your feet and kick out your toes. Go with the dancing and you’ll be part of the show, but to come to point three, that’s the most important to know – “_

Lance clapped a grimy hand on Keith’s shoulder and the music died away, leaving wheedling notes in his ears as Lance replaced the mask on his own face and took a deep, rasping breath of fungicide.

 “Basically, Keith,” Lance patted Keith on the shoulder, “don’t overthink this. It’s easy. Your problem isn’t that you haven’t got things to sing about. You’ve got _too much_.”

Lance was right.

Keith wasn’t only thinking too much. He _felt_ too much, and he didn’t, as a rule, bother naming what it was he felt, mostly because he couldn’t. He felt too quickly, to intensely, like caesium dropped into water, and by the time it was gone there was little point in working out what it was and no time to do so as Keith was caught up by the consequences.

Sadness, anger, guilt, fear. Sometimes he envied people who could so neatly slice up this ‘ _toomuchness’_ into such manageably-sized parcels that they could be named. Then they could be dealt with piece by piece, burned away or shared out through simple _communication_ like the most uncomfortably soul-bearing brownies the universe could invent.

Keith felt on a temperature scale, in lights of reds and blues, dark and shadows, and hots and colds, and Keith always, overwhelmingly, felt _too much_.

Mostly he had channelled it into speed, noise and chasing extraordinary heights, things that made him feel bigger than he actually was just so that the _toomuchness_ would fit under his skin. Articulating what he felt had meant stopping and slowing down, and when Keith stopped and slowed down, people who should have known better caught up and then wouldn’t leave his caesium-in-water blast radius.

He looked at Lance and Pidge and wondered if it was safe to stop and slow down, and then remembered that they were paladins and that without them he wouldn’t have found a place where his _toomuchness_ was right at home, pouring that energy into something bigger than all of them, namely Voltron.

Keith sat back on his heels. Damn it, he was overthinking this. He owed it to all of them and Voltron to sit down and _focus._ To sing or die, this wasn’t a choice. It was an order, demanding him to assess his priorities, face this crazy musical half-hallucinated reality and take responsibility as a paladin.

Keith huffed, something loosening inside him, and folded the gel-rag, setting it on the bucket edge. He tipped his chin at Lance’s slow progress of his patch of the kitchen. “Speaking of ‘too much’, you're doing too much talking and singing and not enough cleaning.”

“It’s called ‘being meticulously careful’ and ‘taking my sweet, unhurried, virtuously patient time’,” said Lance archly, turning his back on Keith to wipe slow, luminous green semi-circles along the side of the Altean oven. “And here I was helping out your poor stubborn mulleted soul when it’s too emotionally _Raaaar_ to articulate itself in civilisation’s great gift that is music and lyrics.”

* * *

 

Something moved in Gallubean astrospace.

Blinking pale violet lights, a Galran space probe, scanning planets for resources and traces of intelligent life, had drifted silently into the system. Against the pale blue rockface of the moon Gallube-36, it was but a tiny speck of dark metal, indistinguishable from debris, and when the Castle Ship passed by it had been swallowed in the ship’s shadow.

The probe blinked and took a picture.

The starlit image of the Castle Ship was then beamed to the nearest Galra outpost, upon which the local commanding officer decided it was more trouble than he was prepared to handle and forwarded it on to another, and then another, and another, in a highly efficient chain of passing the buck until it finally came to a stop at Central Command.

“Sire.” Haggar bowed her head. “Voltron has been sighted.”

Later Lance would tell to all who cared to listen that the Castle Ship had been caught out by a glorified Galran speed camera.

* * *

 

The observation deck in the Atralka Wing was a quiet room. It was small without bright colours or decorations or the blinking artificial lights that after a while drove Keith mad with how _indecisive_ they seemed. The walls were deep blue and curved and the windows stretched from the floor to arch over Keith’s head like a capsule, enclosing him in a bubble of stars. In the right frame of mind, he could imagine that he wasn’t enclosed at all.

What he liked most of all were the seats – three tiers of padded benches, steps really, curving around the room and dropping down to a small circular floor-space like a cockpit-sized amphitheatre.

He could tuck himself against the tier wall and the door of the room would always be at the edge of his vision. Nobody could come up from behind to surprise him and there was always a clear way out, and if he couldn’t sit still he could clamber about the benches with the stars still all around him until that energy burst flickered out again.

Keith was turning his knife over in his hands, making a horizon line in the stars with its edge, when the door opened and Shiro appeared.

Spotting Keith, he smiled. “There you are.”

 “You were looking for me?”

“I was wondering how you were. Pidge said you’d gone to find some space to clear your head but it’s been a few hours.” Shiro cast his eyes around the room, taking in the benches, the curved glass of the ceiling, the bright blue lights from the Castle’s hull glowing softly in through the windows. “You’d think it would be easy to find some space on this ship. After all, there’s plenty of it outside of the Castle’s windows. Space.”

Objectively, that was true. “Yes, there is?”

“Only an airlock jump away.”

“Not funny, Shiro.”

“Really? Oh, well. You can’t say I didn’t try. Clearly, I was wasted on the audience.”

Keith snorted but he couldn’t help cracking a small smile, and Shiro took that as permission to step down the tiers to the bench below Keith’s, where he sat, hands on knees, looking up at the dark, shimmering expanse above them. “Lance mentioned you were having difficulties.”

Keith huffed. “’Pidge said’? ‘Lance mentioned’?”

“That’s what happens when a small group of people spend a lot of time together without much external stimulation. We’re each other’s news and weather. Around the tenth varga of illumination, it’ll be cloudy with a chance of Lance, with a twenty percent likelihood of Hunk.” Shiro glanced up over his shoulder to meet Keith’s gaze. “We’re just worried, Keith. None of us want to see a pile of ashes in Red’s cockpit.”

“But it’s not just me! This,” he held up his right arm and the glowing veins cast red cracked lines of light over Shiro’s face, “is happening to all of us – _will_ happen to all of us if this medicine doesn’t work. It’s not worth worrying - ”

“But the rest of us aren’t genetically inclined to overreact to the Deathsong spores. Keith, I hate to break it to you but, right now, you are worth worrying over.”

 “You know there are better things to be worrying about! Shiro, what are we going to do about forming Voltron? What’d happen if the Galra attacked, right now, and we go in there – “

“Singing and dancing?”

 “Yes!”

Shiro stroked his chin. “Well, you have to admit, Zarkon would never see that coming.”

“I honestly can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”

“Well, I’m not _entirely_ joking.” At Keith’s incredulous stare, Shiro went on. “The Princess thinks it’s possible that, if we need to form Voltron, thanks to the neurotoxin it may even be easier and better coordinated than usual – and from what I’ve gathered from our experiences, it doesn’t actually distract _us_ from the tasks we need to do, but it would more than likely put off the Galra. Maybe even intimidate them if we get lucky with whatever choreography we dream up between us.”

It sounded plausible, maybe even reasonable from a certain frame of mind, if not utterly ridiculous.

The trouble with listening to Shiro was that Keith ended up _listening,_ maybe even when he shouldn’t _._

All too aware of the tight feeling of _toomuchness_ creeping back when he had come to this room to dispel it, Keith breathed, but sucked in a mouthful of fungicide-infused air too quickly and, pulling aside his mask, burst into a series of hacking coughs.

“Are you going to survive until dinner?”

Keith reached out to put a hand on Shiro’s shoulder.

“Shiro,” he coughed, “if I don’t make it, I want you to lead – “

“Okay, enough of that,” said Shiro a little too loudly and Keith grinned, his point made. Shiro turned in his seat to face him, his Galra arm gleaming pale blue from the ship lights coming in through the windows, with the same determined expression as when he had promised to get Keith into the harder levels of the mission simulator that were beyond Keith’s access rank. “Somehow we’re going to have you singing before the food’s on the table.”

Keith aimed for a lighter tone. “Or Voltron won’t have a right arm anymore.”

“No, Keith,” Shiro rose, standing on the lower bench so that he loomed over Keith with his hands on his hips, “you’re more than our right arm. You’re more than Voltron’s sword.” His eyes fell to the luxite knife on the bench next to Keith’s hand. “More than a blade. You know that, don’t you?”

Keith laughed and something bubbled, swelled and, in that quiet space he had finally made between all the strands of his thoughts and feelings, it finally popped.

_“Isn’t that just what I’ve always been?”_

And, lo, there was a quiet _plink!_

Shiro’s face split into a huge, relieved grin. “You’re singing!”

Keith had sung.

Keith was _singing._

The _plink!_ was followed by a softer reprise of the song Lance had sung in whilst they had cleaned the kitchen, and underneath the elation that he _wasn’t going to die_ Keith felt a stir of stubborn resistance as the music _tugged._

Lance had told him to go with the flow but going along with anything without putting up a fight went against every one of Keith’s instincts.  His hands moved to his mouth on reflex before Shiro shot him a look and, realising what he was doing, Keith lowered them to his knees.

“Come on, stubborn.” Shiro offered his hand, and the piano wove between the notes of the violin as though chivvying it along, giving it handholds for its tune to latch onto. “You can’t sing lying down.”

  _“Yes, I can.”_

But he took Shiro’s hand and let himself be hauled off the bench, down to Shiro’s tier, and then shoved into that flat circle of space at the mini-amphitheatre’s centre. Shiro settled back on the lowest tier of benches and folded his arms, all ready to watch whatever show the Deathsong had in store.

Keith bunched his hands into fists. _Bring it on, space mould._  

The piano and violin flowed, pulling at Keith with their tune. He took a deep breath, filling out his lungs, let his ribcage expand and feel light with air, like a swimmer bracing for a plunge into water.

He faced the stars, ignored the reflected red tracery of his veins in the glass, and _let go._

 “ _All my life I’ve wanted answers,”_ the music was quiet, Keith’s voice was exposed, “ _all my life I’ve been searching for something I couldn’t describe.”_

The window under his palm was cool and steadying. Beyond it, space - dark with the shadows of the Gallubean system’s planets not so far away, reminding him gently that a moment of musical embarrassment was nothing in the face of the vastness of the universe.

 _“I thought it could be freedom, but from what, I could never decide.”_  Violins followed his tune, louder than before, but then they faded again as though to give his voice some space. “ _Gravity, the lies of people, or being a blade that could never hide.”_

Keith’s face in the window was pale blue under the ship lights, but with the thin red glow from the quintessence burning up under his skin it could have passed for a troubling mauve. He forced himself to look. Accept.

_“All my life I’ve been a blade, all my life I’ve been labelled ‘Handle with care’._

_Don’t get too close – the kid’s edges are bare,_

_As though the bite of my blade was all I could share.”_

Shiro made a small noise from where he was seated, something indignant and sad. Keith wanted to stop and tell him that it was alright, that there was nothing Shiro could do about the times from before they met, but the music was already moving on, drawing the song from his lungs and his head like pus from a wound.

It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. Singing, it was just screaming that made sense. Melody threaded the lyrics together, shaped his breath, and where words failed to mean everything he wanted the music in his ears conveyed it instead.

He could feel his head clearing like skies of rain. It crystallised clear as the view of space before him that he wanted, for once, to be heard, to have this known, and it was easier this way. Words with Keith had always left room for misunderstanding, but with song that room was filled.

He closed his eyes and the music called for a wry smile. _“They wanted to box me out of sight. They said, Keith, there’s no place for blades outside of a fight.”_

The luxite dagger was in his hands, dark with a deep purple sheen and deeper blue whorls. He held it up to the window.

“ _But my knife was my questions, and my questions were me. I had ‘disciplinary issues.”_

The music dug deep and plucked at old wires, barbed and tangled, and Keith was nine, he was twelve, he was fifteen, he was eighteen, written off and thrown out of a back door by the scruff until he was tall enough that they had to stop throwing him, his feet touched the ground and he could say that he walked out on his own two feet into an empty future instead.

“ _There was no helping me.”_

He turned and caught Shiro’s gaze, held it. Solid, warm, dependable Shiro who had come crash-landing back to Keith from an alien gladiator arena but, in Keith’s books, may just as well have come back from the realms of the dead. The first and only one of those who left who had ever returned as they said they would.

It may have been a trick of the starlight, but it looked as if Shiro’s eyes were glistening. Keith could have laughed. The sappy sentimental fool. Trust him to be won over by a few violins.

But Keith didn’t laugh. He looked straight at the man who had changed his life and let the neurotoxins work their magic where Keith’s words had never felt adequate.

 _“Nobody dared til I met you.”_ Piano flowed and rippled, it sounded like rain if rain could fall upwards.  “ _Nobody dared to see_

_Nobody ever took me out of myself_

_Dared trust the blade in me.”_

Later Keith would deny using his knife as a prop in his impromptu musical, so just as he most certainly did not eye his reflection in its blade, he also did not spread out his arms, turn on the spot, and hold the knife to the stars above him, as though ready to fight the universe rather than defend it.

None of that happened outside of this moment.

_“They failed to see and realise, that when a blade is taken up and recognised,_

_A blade doesn’t know how to compromise,_

_It gives its edges, its weight, its steel,_

_It gives a friend its all…”_

Keith lowered his arm. The music had risen in a crescendo only to die at the last minute again. Echoes of the violins remained. All it did was make him stupidly aware of his breathing and Shiro listening, watching as the music cracked him open and gave voice to all that Keith had wanted to say but never found the courage or the words for.  

 _“My life,”_ he swallowed, his mouth dry, “ _would have been a whole lot different,_

_If I had never met you, so for everything you’ve ever done for me, just a blade,_

_I can only say,”_ his voice trailed but not into silence, “ _‘thank you’.”_

“Oh, Keith.” Shiro wiped his eyes with a forefinger and surged up from the bench, cracking his knuckles. “Okay, I think it’s time to add some _baritone_.”

The music swept Shiro into the amphitheatre circle and it really did _sweep_ with the determined swirl of an ocean wave, pulling feet into the tideline.

“ _You’re more than just a blade, Keith._ ” Keith scoffed but Shiro stepped in closer and this close Shiro was so _believable_. “ _You’re more than Voltron’s right arm. If nothing I say can convince you, then maybe something I sing will do the charm.”_

Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t. Cellos played. Keith wanted to believe.

 _“You said I’m like a brother to you.”_ All the aches and the pains of the trials of Marmora flrefly-flickered between them. Keith listened and Shiro sung. _“Now let me say my part. I don’t think I’m as good, or strong, or brave as you believe me to be, but I can sing this from the bottom of my heart.”_

Shiro’s hand landed on Keith’s shoulder and the tough was gentle and warm.

“ _If I could have a brother,”_  the prosthetic hand landed on Keith’s other shoulder, gleaming in the corner of Keith’s eye, “ _I would wish for no other.”_  Shiro gripped both his shoulders and Keith felt as though he was _here,_ anchored and grounded into reality, like a solar wind could blow by and it could never hurt him.

 _“You’re my brother,”_ the stars glittered, the music glittered, there was even a mischievous sort of glitter in Shiro’s eyes, “ _from a…possibly purple mother.”_

Keith scowled on reflex but the music was light with a softly affectionate hook and it was nothing less than sincere, sung, just as Shiro had said, from somewhere deep and close to whatever he held at his core, truths.

Buoyed up by fondness that was in equal parts touched with exasperation, elation and relief, he met Shiro’s gaze. “ _Trust you to make this song even cheesier than before.”_

Shiro smirked. _“But you do trust me.”_

 _“I’ll always trust you,”_ it sprang from Keith like a fundamental law.

“ _So trust me when I say that you are and can be so much more,”_ Shiro stepped back and it struck Keith too late that the music had manipulated them into standing side by side, perfect for something suspiciously like a line da –

His feet moved of their own volition, and suddenly they were both sliding to the left, arms out, coming to a perfectly coordinated stop then stomp of their right feet, as though part of a choreographed routine that they both _just knew_.

Ah, right. They were doing this then. Dancing.

 _“You’re my brother from a purple mother.”_  Shiro didn’t seem in the least bit fazed by the jazz-infused routine they were pulling off somehow in a space that wasn’t remotely large enough. When they both slid again, this time to the right, Shiro was smiling as they stomped. “ _Sometimes when it’s too dark to see beyond despair -”_

 _“All my life I’ve wanted answers,”_ Keith’s voice rose over Shiro’s and the band like something taking flight, and the two tunes came together as though they were always meant to. “ _All my life I’ve searched for something I didn’t know the questions to.”_

 _“- I can count on you to have my back.”_ Shiro offered his left fist. Keith bumped it with his own then seized Shiro’s forearm, kicked off and cartwheeled across Shiro’s shoulders to land lightly on his other side.  “ _That you’ll be right there.”_

 _“I’m still searching but I don’t feel so lost, knowing that I’m searching alongside you.”_ Keith turned and Shiro did the same, so that they faced each other across the floor, eye to eye and song to song, pale silver smoke rising from their necks and shoulders and the angry red-gold in Keith’s veins fading along with its itch. “ _I’m your  – “_

_“ You’re my – “_

_“ – brother from a purple mother, although if she’s mauve or lilac, we’ve yet to really discover,”_ they sang together, arms out and open wide as though to catch the other if they fell, and the sound from the hallucinated band was big and brassy. “ _We’ll always be there for each other._

“ _The universe is wide and its nights are forever,_

 _But you’ve got my six, and I’ve got yours_.

_If you’re ever in trouble, we’re not friends of fair weather._

_Your troubles are my troubles,” c_ losing the remaining distance, they grasped each other’s hands, “ _we’ll fight our fights together.”_

Shiro’s eyes flickered to Keith’s arm and widened when he saw that the red lights in his skin had faded.

He had time to mouth, “It’s working!” before the music caught them up again, but this time it didn’t push, pull, or demand. It eased into something gentler, curling around them, steady and safe.

Maybe it was the adrenaline or his poor breath control, but Keith felt light, too light on his feet and definitely lightheaded, but also light in his chest, as though something heavy and stuck there too long had been finally dislodged.

When the music let him pause to catch his breath after reaching for notes longer and higher and stronger than what he was used to, Shiro sang on.

  _“Keith, it doesn’t matter what colour is your mother.”_

They pulled each other in close by their clasped hands. Oh, there was no use denying that, in the long run, it _did_ matter, but, in a way, Shiro wasn’t wrong. The shadow it cast at the back of Keith’s mind was smaller, the purple elephant in the room shrunken during the course of the song.

It was difficult for Keith to be afraid of something that he had sung and danced over and Shiro – Shiro wasn’t afraid. Shiro was singing and dancing too, laughing over the terrible lyrics, over Keith’s mystery heritage, right along with him.

_“You’re still the man you were before, and that’s my brother.”_

Coran had vaguely hinted that he was saving recordings of the paladins singing from the Castle CCTV. Maybe, just maybe, if Keith worked out how to do this subtly, he could get hold of a copy of this sappy and awful song. Just for those days when things were again _too much_ , to laugh over.

 Keith sucked in a breath for what he felt as a tickle under his skin as the final verse and with their clasped hands between them, they sung.

 “ _This bond, this connection, it’s not blood that we share.”_  A flicker of movement in the corner of Keith’s eye, a shadow in the doorway - but Shiro didn’t react to it. Perhaps Keith had imagined it. They were hallucinating music after all. He put it out of his mind and joined Shiro for the final few lines. “ _It’s the knowing that in the universe we could be anywhere -”_

“ _And I’ll find you,_ ”  Keith promised, gripping Shiro’s hand harder than he maybe should in a _dance_ and not a fight, but that was the trouble with anybody he ever cared about – he could never hold onto them hard enough to stop them from slipping through his fingers.

 He looked up, met Shiro’s eyes. “ _I’ll always find you._ ”

 _“You can count on me,”_ they sang together, and Keith’s line rose high, holding onto ‘me’, drawing it out into something silvery and embarrassingly pure, but he had stopped caring two verses ago. Shiro’s line, lower, grounded everything together. 

“ _To be,”_ Shiro pulled Keith into a hug and Keith put his arms around him, “ _there.”_

The observation deck was small and close and full of stars. The music floated.

All traces of the crackling fire threatening to burn up Keith from inside had vanished.

He closed his eyes and smiled into Shiro’s shoulder.   _“Don’t disappear.”_

_Plink!_

Shiro started as the spotlight, hot and chalky white, dropped down on him.

Keith hadn’t noticed. He stood still and stiff, frozen, the spotlight falling on the back of his head.

The music came creeping back, slithering and uncertain, just for Shiro.

A spotlight moment for Shiro. Keith wouldn’t hear a single word of this. He wouldn’t even know it was happening. 

Shiro looked into the darkness beyond Keith’s head, outside of the spotlight boundaries, at the dark that wiped out the room and the stars, and the lyrics tumbled from him like a confession. _“I don’t want to let him down.”_

_Plink!_

The spotlight was gone. Shiro blinked and the room, Keith, the stars and space all around them, everything was as it should have been.

He tightened his grip and hoped that Keith hadn’t noticed anything amiss. _“I’ll always be right here.”_

_Plink!_

Light flashed down, bright and cold, and Shiro sighed, closing his eyes.

_“I hope that I won’t let him down.”_

* * *

Lance stepped back from the doorway. He had heard enough. Keith had sung and he wasn't going to die. Now their rivalry could resume as normal.

Retreating down the passage, Lance tried not to think about a home that was very far away, of the voices that called _him_ ‘brother’, the arms that pulled _him_ in close to remind him where he was safe, welcome and cared for, and the family he had left behind on Earth.

Lucky Keith to find his family up in the stars.

Lucky, lucky Keith.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and let me know what you think. ;) Lance is due his angst ballad next.
> 
> This chapter was brought to you on the back of Disney's Hercules, Les Mis and the London cast recording of Matilda (listen to Matilda. It's a beautiful thing).

**Author's Note:**

> The fungus doesn't quite work like the curse in Buffy, but I'm borrowing its effects. 
> 
> If anybody's curious, Allura and Coran are actually hearing in Altean water-opera because their brains don't associate what the humans hear as music and this is the closest equivalent. The humans would be singing middle-range, fairly minimalistic sections to their ears, since none of them are capable of the real vocal complexity of an Altean or of reaching the high notes that are beyond human vocal cords. Allura's singing a similar during her sung-through sections, but she's concerned of what'll happen if she's a dramatic enough of a moment to go solo.
> 
> I'm on tumblr under the same username, dreaming more terrible music and lyrics to come. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think. I thrive off words, words, words.


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